HEART THE LOVER, by Lily King
Let the polycule have its moment, the love triangle is here to stay. And Lily King might be one of its steadiest living torchbearers: Over five novels and a story collection, she has made this particular form of romantic entanglement something of a motif. Her previous novel, “Writers & Lovers,” was about a 30-something aspiring novelist named Casey who’s juggling two suitors: an older, more stable, established writer and father, and his student Silas, who’s just as lost and inscrutable as Casey is. (King’s novel before that, “Euphoria,” was a fictionalized account of the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s 1933 trip to New Guinea with her second husband and the man who would become her third.)
The author’s latest, “Heart the Lover,” can be read as a kind of combined prequel and sequel to “Writers & Lovers,” revisiting the same narrator’s life as a college student and then, decades later, as an acclaimed writer and married mother of two, happy and settled in the life she’s chosen with Silas. But the drama in this book stands alone; King leaves the connection implied, a reward for her returning audience, until the penultimate sentence.
For most of the novel, we know her only as Jordan, a nickname given to her by her college boyfriend Sam and his best friend Yash, the “two smart guys” in the front row of her 17th-century lit class. (“She’s not Daisy Buchanan, she’s Jordan Baker,” chirp the nerds when they discover she used to play golf.) On their first date Sam brings her back to the house he shares with Yash, and the couple spend the remainder of their senior year arguing and doing “everything but” — Sam is a devout Baptist — while Jordan can’t help forming a gradual, chaste bond with the funny, gangly roommate down the hall.
King is a master of sexual tension, of the slow build, of gratification torturously delayed. In this respect, “Heart the Lover” is her best work yet. In the mornings Yash saunters downstairs to mock the bland breakfasts Sam has prepared for Jordan, swapping the ketchup with his own more flavorful sauces and the coffee she doesn’t want with the tea she does. “Two heathens against one saint,” Yash says giddily when he finds out her parents are divorced, like his. Jordan’s “favorite nights are staying in and helping Yash pick out a shirt for a date,” waiting up for him to come back “and tell us everything.”
Eventually Jordan and Yash are cooking breakfast for two, alone in the boys’ kitchen, while Sam is at church washing off the sin of his romantic relationship. They smoke pipes together behind Sam’s back and she notes “the stem is a little wet from where Yash put his lips.” Upon learning that he’s staying on campus for another semester, she takes out more student loans to do the same.
Once Jordan and Sam break up for good, the will-they-won’t-they accelerates, King revealing her narrator’s intense feelings for Yash implicitly, inevitably, the way our own crushes only belatedly reveal themselves to us.
And, god, to have had a crush in the 1980s: When Yash returns to campus from a visit home, he has to track down Jordan on the landline at her summer job, which makes for an adorable surprise phone call in front of her stoned boss. “I wasn’t glaring,” the man says when she hangs up. “I just thought I might have to go get my defibrillator for you.”
Yash arrives to crash on her couch “for just a night or two,” and the 20 breathless pages that outline that first evening are the kind of thing girls read over and over alone in their bedrooms at night. “I was the one who pointed you out to Sam, you know,” Yash says during the most romantic non-date dinner in human history. “I noticed you. First.”
Once their relationship begins in earnest, its particulars are a lot less sexy and fun — but still King renders this downward parabola of disappointment as tantalizingly as its buildup. Jordan spends much of the semester hiding — from Sam’s friends lurking around campus, from Sam himself when he drops in to visit Yash. Like many young romances, this one is hindered by the different paths lives can take in their early 20s — he is pressured into working for the family whiskey business in Tennessee, she takes an opportunity to work and write in Paris — and, always, by the specter of Sam’s disapproval.
Just as it all implodes in a heartbreak worthy of a tasteful soap opera, King flashes 21 years into the future, when Yash arrives in Maine for an awkward visit with Jordan, Silas and their two young boys. (“The familiarity is too much,” she thinks, her narration now intermittently addressing Yash in the second person. “It goes too deep. I don’t know why you’ve come.”)
What happened between them remains unaddressed until the book’s tragic third act, which tugs our middle-aged narrator in two cruel, conflicting directions at once. There is in one part of the country an impending, potentially lifesaving pediatric surgery, and, in another, a cathartic hospital-bed requiem, a pre-death post-mortem for a great love cut short a lifetime ago. The long-delayed revelations, like the tears, come fast and hot.
It is, of course, another kind of love triangle, this one cast over with later life’s somber deference to mortality. We are no longer looking forward, but back. On the first night Jordan spends at Sam and Yash’s place in college, she is trying to find the bathroom when she stumbles upon Yash, asleep and surrounded by books, “in a twin bed under a yellow bedspread,” King writes, in an image of boyhood and pure tenderness that is hard to forget. “He’s on his back with a concentrated, serious expression I’ve never seen before, as if sleep were very hard work.”
A generation later, on the morning of the last day she sees him, the day she will return to her real family that needs her, Jordan beholds Yash in a different bed, awake but with his eyes closed. “I see the boy sleeping on his back on the twin bed beneath the yellow bedspread,” she thinks, as a wiser, softer Sam stands beside her. Everything and nothing has changed; the love and its loss are one and the same.
HEART THE LOVER | By Lily King | Grove | 249 pp. | $28
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